The Omega Theory (30 page)

“So what are you saying? That the program is conscious? That it has our best interests at heart?”

Olam shook his head. “All I’m saying is that everything is chosen according to a plan. Every movement of every particle. And in that sense, the universe cares about us. Everything and everyone is important. And that’s reassuring, yes?”

David shrugged. He couldn’t think about this right now. He was sweaty and disoriented and very frightened. He wished Olam would just stop talking.

The man patted his shoulder. “I need to speak to Agent Parker for a moment. Slide down here and take my place.”

He stood up and made his way to the stern, where Lucille sat next to the Zodiac’s coxswain. As soon as Olam left, David gratefully slid next to Monique. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even turn her head. But she stretched her hand toward his and clasped it.

Thirty minutes later, the coxswain throttled back the engine and the Zodiac slowed. David gazed ahead and saw a long black ridge on the southern horizon, running between the surface of the gulf and the starry sky. After ten more minutes the coxswain shut off the outboard and raised the propeller, and the commandos jumped out of the boat and began dragging it to shore. David and Monique got out, too, first splashing in the shallow water and then walking on a salt flat that crunched under their boots. Soon the commandos beached all three Zodiacs and headed for the ridge.

A narrow trail climbed the steep slope. David was scrambling up the trail, behind Olam and Lucille and ahead of Monique, when he saw a flashing light. Someone was signaling to them. This man was yet another of Olam’s
Sayeret Matkal
comrades, a Mossad agent who’d worked for several years in Central Asia. Olam had already briefed the assault team about the purpose of this rendezvous, but David was still impressed when he reached the top of the trail and saw what was waiting there. A herd of twenty-two horses stood near the edge of the ridge, their bridles held by local Turkmen boys hired by the Mossad agent.

Monique caught up to David and stood beside him. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered.

“They’re Akhal-Tekes, the golden horses of Turkmenistan,” he whispered back. “They’re supposed to have fantastic speed and stamina.”

Monique approached one of the animals, holding out her hand and speaking to it gently. Although she was a city girl, she’d done some weekend horseback riding when she was a professor at Princeton. David’s experience was more limited—he’d gone on a pony ride when he was seven and spent a day and a half at a dude ranch with his first wife ten years ago. But Olam had assured him that the Akhal-Tekes were gentle creatures and that David’s horse would instinctively follow the others in the herd. One of the Turkmen boys helped David into the saddle and held the bridle while he got the horse under control.

Olam ordered two of the commandos to stay behind to guard the Zodiacs. Another six were assigned to reconnaissance: riding the fastest horses, they would venture several miles ahead of the main party and screen its flanks, ready to radio a warning if they spotted any threat. That left Olam, David, Monique, Lucille, and twelve others in the main group. They trotted off to the south, heading across an arid plain toward the military depot.

It was the emptiest country David had ever seen. The landscape was relentlessly flat and the only lights were the stars overhead. He could hear his horse’s hooves striking hard-packed sand, but he couldn’t see the ground or any of the other Akhal-Tekes. It was amazing that the horses could find their way in the dark. Their night vision was clearly better than his. After a while he started to enjoy the ride, the sensation of flying through the darkness with the cool wind buffeting his face. The other horses trotted ahead and behind him, their hooves pummeling the plain, and he wondered which one was Monique’s. It was so exhilarating that for a few seconds he forgot all about the X-ray laser and what they were planning to do.

After an hour, though, David started to get saddle sore, and the ride became a lot less exhilarating. But Olam didn’t stop. At 2
A.M.
a crescent moon rose above the horizon, and its light seemed almost blinding compared with the darkness they’d been traveling through. David could suddenly see the other horses and riders beside him and the sweat streaming down his own horse’s neck. And in the distance, about half a mile ahead, he saw a sinuous stretch of cliffs gleaming in the moonlight. It was an enormous, jagged wall of rock looming over the plain like the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. The moonlight illuminated the strata running across the rock face, broad bands of lighter-colored stone alternating with darker layers.

“Yangykala,” Olam muttered. He was riding a few feet to David’s left.

“What? Is that the name of the canyon?”

Olam nodded. “It means ‘burning fortress.’ Come, let’s hurry. Now that the moon is up, anyone can see us. Head for the shadows below the cliffs.”

A minute later they cantered into the shadowed area at the base of the rock wall. They rode single file, with Olam in the lead, entering a ravine that twisted deeper into the canyon. David saw towering rock formations on all sides, shaped like castles and temples and spires and prows. It made him feel a bit claustrophobic—the cliffs had an angry, menacing look, as if they were just waiting to slide forward and crush the life out of him. He was starting to wonder if maybe they’d taken a wrong turn when Olam gave a signal to halt the column. The commandos dismounted and David clumsily did the same.

Olam scrambled up to a rock shelf, then lay on his stomach and peered through his binoculars, which were equipped with an infrared display. To David’s surprise, Lucille followed right behind him, moving as nimbly as a mountain goat, and took out her own pair of binoculars. After several seconds Olam waved at David and Monique, signaling them to come forward. They joined him on the shelf, crawling on all fours. Olam passed his binoculars to David. “Take a look at the depot,” he whispered. “And tell me what you think.”

David fitted the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. He saw a building that looked like a small warehouse, maybe a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, sitting at the head of the ravine where the canyon dead-ended. The building was surrounded by sheer cliffs on three sides. For extra protection it was enclosed in a rectangle of chain-link fencing, about twenty feet high. “It’s a good location,” David said. “Very defensible.”

Olam nodded. “What do you think of the security?”

“I don’t see any guards or sentries. But I suppose they could be somewhere inside the building.”

Olam took the binoculars from David and handed them to Monique. “What about you? You see anything unusual?”

“The lights are out,” she said from behind the binoculars. “The compound has floodlights, but they’re turned off. Without the lights, they can’t see if anyone’s approaching. Which suggests that either they’re very stupid or no one’s there.”

“Correct.” Olam smiled at her. “It looks like the soldiers locked up the place and went home. While we were on the trawler we scanned the radio bands used by the Turkmen military and overheard some unusual messages. It appears that the country’s president ordered his internal security forces to pull back to the capital for some reason. This might be a very lucky thing for us.”

“Or it might be a trap.” This warning came from Lucille, who’d just lowered her binoculars. “The soldiers could be hiding in the building, waiting to ambush us.”

Olam nodded. “Correct again. We must be cautious.”

He turned around and went back to confer with his commandos. Two of them detached from the group and headed for the storage depot, one carrying a pair of bolt cutters and the other holding a sledgehammer and a Halligan bar. Four other commandos took up positions on the ledges of the surrounding cliffs and pointed their rifles at the compound. Then Olam returned to the rock shelf carrying two more pairs of binoculars. He gave one to David and kept one for himself. “Now we can all see what happens.”

David trained his binoculars on the two commandos approaching the depot. Because the infrared scope captured heat emissions, the heads and hands of the men glowed brightly on the display. The commandos crept up to the fence and sliced through the chain-link with the bolt cutters. Then they slipped into the compound and scuttled toward the building’s entrance. Working together, they inserted the Halligan bar between the door and the frame and pounded it with the sledgehammer. The noise echoed in the ravine. In a few seconds the commandos pried the door open and rushed into the building.

The echoes died and the canyon was silent again. David couldn’t see the commandos anymore. His stomach clenched as the silence went on. Then Olam’s radio crackled with a spurt of Hebrew words. Olam responded in Hebrew, then turned to David and Monique. “There are no Turkmen soldiers in the building. But my men have found an aluminum cylinder. About three meters long and one meter in diameter.”

David nodded. “Those are the dimensions of Excalibur. It must be the Russian copy of the laser.”

“Not so fast,” Olam said. “I want you and Dr. Reynolds to go to the building and see if it’s really the X-ray laser. You saw the damaged laser in the storage room at Soreq, so you know what to look for. It should have a sliding panel at the midpoint of the cylinder, and the twelve laser rods should be inside. Once you confirm that it’s the laser, tell the men to begin placing the C-4 charges.” He turned around and pointed at the six remaining commandos, each of whom carried a munitions bag. “That’s the ordnance team. They have enough explosives to level the building.”

Lucille rose to her feet. “Wait a second,” she said. “If Swift and Reynolds are going in, I’m going with them.”

Olam nodded. “Understood. I’ll stay outside and keep watch with the other men on the cliffs. Just in case the
Qliphoth
decide to sneak up on us. Because they want the laser, too, yes?” Smiling, he patted the sniper rifle slung over his shoulder.

“All right,” Lucille said. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” Then she and David and Monique followed the men in the ordnance team, who were already jogging toward the depot.

They ducked through the cut in the fence, then ran to the door that had been pried open. Inside the warehouse, David saw flashlight beams crisscrossing the darkness, illuminating dozens of old crates stamped with Cyrillic letters. The ordnance team opened their munitions bags and pulled out spools of wire and yellow bricks of C-4, which looked like blocks of cheese wrapped in cellophane. Meanwhile, the two commandos who’d broken into the building stood in the center of the room, pointing their flashlights at a long aluminum cylinder resting on wooden trestles. As David approached the device he saw the sliding panel, which curved around the cylinder’s waist. It resembled the sliding cover of a rolltop desk, and was just big enough for the insertion of a nuclear warhead. The design allowed the warhead to be placed next to the laser rods. Once the bomb was in position, the panel would be closed and the air pumped out of the cylinder so the radiation from the nuclear blast could travel unimpeded to the lasers.

The panel was closed now. Tentatively, David grasped its upper edge. He needed to slide the panel down to see if the laser rods were inside the cylinder. He was half afraid that an old nuclear warhead would also be in there, but he knew this was absurd. The Russians wouldn’t have left
that
behind.

He tried to slide the panel down but it didn’t move. He tried again, putting a little more muscle into it. Still it wouldn’t budge.

Monique came over to him. “What’s wrong? It won’t open?”

“It hasn’t been opened in twenty years. It’s probably rusty.”

Now Lucille stepped forward. “Here, let me give you a hand.”

David moved over and Lucille gripped the panel’s edge. She whispered, “One, two, three,” and on “three” they both yanked on the panel and it came sliding down. David saw, to his relief, that there was no nuclear warhead inside. But there were also no laser rods. The cylinder was empty except for a stack of yellow bricks, each impaled by a slender metal plug that was connected to a tangle of wires. They looked like the bricks that the Israelis had just taken out of their munitions bags, the blocks of C-4. This confused David—how did they get in here already? But Lucille saw the reason right away.

“BOMB!” she yelled. She turned around to face Olam’s commandos, who stopped what they were doing. “THE CYLINDER’S RIGGED! EVERYONE GET OUT!”

Then Lucille turned toward the door and lowered her torso like a linebacker. Hooking David with her right arm and Monique with her left, she shoved them across the warehouse, still yelling, “BOMB! BOMB! BOMB!” They’d just reached the door, a few steps ahead of the commandos, when the C-4 exploded.

28

ARYEH GOLDBERG WAS AN EXPERT CODE BREAKER. BEFORE HE’D JOINED SHIN
Bet, he’d done his army service in Unit 8200, the famed IDF division that deciphered the communications of Israel’s enemies. For three years he’d decrypted the coded radio messages of the Syrian and Lebanese armies, which were picked up by the Israeli listening station on Mount Avital in the Golan Heights. And in the years since then, Aryeh had improved his code-breaking skills, learning new cryptographic techniques while working for Shin Bet. But when he saw Olam ben Z’man’s quantum computer, he knew everything had changed. Thanks to this cabinet full of glass tubes and optical fibers, all his hard-earned expertise was obsolete.

Now Aryeh sat at a desk in Olam’s trailer in Shalhevet, feeding data to the computer. The data came, coincidentally enough, from Unit 8200; Olam was an old friend of General Yaron, the unit’s commander. Shortly before Olam left for Turkmenistan with the Americans, he’d quietly made an arrangement with Yaron, offering to decrypt any coded messages that Unit 8200 couldn’t break. So on the morning of June 13, one of the settlement’s
kippot srugot
—a young, slender zealot named Ehud ben Ezra—picked up a stack of computer disks from the Unit 8200 headquarters in Herzliya and delivered them to Shalhevet. The disks, which now lay on the desk in front of Aryeh, contained all the encrypted communications that had been intercepted by Israeli listening stations over the past three days.